My Parents' Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Free Documentaries about the Nazis and World War II

Some of the best recent documentaries about the Nazis, their motivation, and the suffering they imposed are available for free from youtube.com. (The only down-side is that the documentaries are broken into segments that tend to be about 10 minutes long.) I would be happy to add other documentaries to this list. Just let me know what's available for free online.

I highly recommend the following:

The Nazis: A Warning From History BBC, part 1 (many interviews with German soldiers, politicians, and civilians about their attitudes toward the Nazis)

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution BBC, part 1 (very well produced, includes re-enactments of key moments and interviews with former SS men who served at Auschwitz)

The Third Reich, part 1, from the History Channel (relies heavily on personal films and photographs)

The World at War: Inside the Third Reich, part 1 (Older BBC series, still compelling)

1 comment:

After years of discussion and over half a century of waiting, the United States has finally honored the Americans who helped fight World War II with a memorial. The World War II Memorial, which opened to the public on April 29, 2004, is located at what was once the Rainbow Pool, centered between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).